Go for political power, Omoragbon urges nurses

With the immediate Past President of National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives Alhaji Adeniji, the Chairman to the Board of Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, Dr Bola Ofi, and a Madam Stella Director in the Nursing Council,  Nigeria at the ongoing Nigerian Nursing Leaders Conference in Abuja

Pastor Peters Omoragbon, the President of the Nurses Across the Borders International, has urged nurses in Nigeria to do everything possible to seek political power for the benefit of the members.

Omoragbon gave the advice in his intervention at the 2024 Nigeria Nursing Leaders Conference which took place in Abuja, on Thursday, April 18, 2024.

He said, “As much as I encourage and I appreciate the need for us to read up to the highest level, I also want us to be more interested in political power.”

Omoragbon while espousing the need for political power enlightened his colleagues on what is obtainable in the Federal Ministry of Health and the need for nurses to head some of the departments that should ordinarily be under the purview of the nurses. “Now if you look at the structure of the federal ministry of health, there are eight departments of the federal ministry of health, and all the eight departments are all occupied by one single professional group. The ministry of health is a multi-disciplinary ministry where you have many professional groups, not just doctors and nurses, but nurses form the single largest professional group within the health system anywhere in the world. Now a situation where you have a department of hospital services and you have a division of nursing services under the hospital services headed by a director of nursing services, and hospital services is headed by director of hospital services, the question I want to ask is, do you have two directors, that is lower director and senior director?. In the civil service, a director is a director, and their grade level is grade level 17, so it depends on when you are promoted a Director or employed that determines your seniority level. And so the argument that, the departments were created for administrative purpose is deliberate ploy to deny nurses their autonomy by the Federal Ministry of Health is untenable. We must resist this continuous subjugation and oppression.

“How are directors appointed, they are appointed at the recommendation of the minister of health who is appointed by president but there is this general notion that it is only one professional group in the ministry that can occupy the office of the minster. The office of the minister is a political appointment, it is not based on whether you are a doctor or you are a nurse. It is purely administrative not professional or clinical. That is why every professional group within the ministry is headed by a Director. So the Minister of health could have been a nurse, a doctor, a pharmacist or even a non-healthcare professional. In United Kingdom, you don’t have doctors occupying the office of the secretary for health, he is a civil servant, and so, I want us to remove this mentality from our collective psyche, as we are progressing, that only a particular profession can occupy the office of the Minister” Omoragbon advocated.

He said the nursing authorities should step up their game by not only fighting for salary increment but to also seek political power for the members. “Enough of the fact that you begin to fight for enhance salary structure, whatever, in our days it was enhanced university structure, we cannot continue to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a change; it doesn’t work that way. As you improve on your training, also begin to show interest in political power, because if you don’t have anybody there to speak for you, you will waste your time, that is just what I want to appeal to us. So whichever way we want to go about it, we can also include political studies in our curriculum.”